06/13/99
Mr. Stubbs

Okay, let me consult my notes here...see what you need to know...

Oh, okay - first thing: I understand I have a new reader. Hi, Lauren! Please, enjoy, feel free to comment. We're glad to have ya.

I saw Two Strange Things on Thursday. I took the trolley home at lunch and got off in front of Jack's to grab a loaf of bread. At the trolley stop across the street from me I saw a tiny little wrinkled-up old black man, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a sleeveless sweater and a huge, embroidered-and-sequined sombrero. It looked like he'd gone into some tacky Mexican restaurant and lifted some of their decorations. It was so big! He could have had friends join him in the cool, sombrero-generated shade.

Thursday afternoon I went to Kroger to visit the bank. The Kroger on Poplar is the favorite grocery store of the city's immigrant population, so you're likely not to hear English being spoken there, which is neat. Unfortunately, this particular Kroger has that rotten-food, sour-milk smell that your less well-maintained grocery stores always seem to have.

(In a weird subcategory, I went by there Friday afternoon to cash a check and there was this woman in line at the bank who had this bizarre pattern of scars all around her eyes and down her cheeks. It wasn't like a burn or anything, 'cause they were like little scar-dots symmetrically placed on both sides of this woman's face. It was cool, in a disturbing kind of way. She's never going to get a decent job, though. Sonya and I guessed it must be an African/tribal thing and she must have been a recent immigrant. She's got those tattoo/body modification kids beat!

Also, when we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago I saw this girl working a cash register. She had thorny vines tattooed across her forehead. Have fun telling your grandkids about that one, honey!)

The other Strange Thing was in the Kroger parking lot. To paraphrase a hokey and overused saying,

"I cried when I had no shoes
and at Kroger I saw a man
who had no feet."

This guy was tooling around in the Kroger parking lot, kicking in the air with his footless legs. Just a rollin' and a kickin'.

"They call me Mr. Stubbs!" I said to myself, driving away.




Friday? I found some hints for the best man that I found rather helpful. Jen and James cam down to the house Friday night but I can't remember what the hell happened. Saturday morning I went on a walking tour of Downtown, stopping at Jack's, Walgreens and the post office. Did you know if you get a priority mail package out of one of the vending machines it gives you a $3.20 stamp and a sticker that says "Priority Mail" to put on your envelope? I didn't. After being so industrious I treated myself to a new Stephen King book (Bag of Bones, which is so far satisfyingly creepy) and lounged about on the couch for a few hours until James called me to go runnin' around with him. Which I did.

(I realize your snobbier reader types thing Stephen King is a bit of a hack, but I like him. Always have, for as long as I've been reading anyway. He's a consummate storyteller, and his Dark Tower world is as rich and detailed as anything anyone else has produced in the last few years. I love Stephen King, and I am not ashamed.)

I can kill hours browsing around a book store. So can James. So we shot the afternoon at Bookstar, treating the place like a library. It was nice. We capped the afternoon with a genuine Philly cheese sandwich at Lenny's, a new deli. It was yummy, but not to healthful. Cheese, red meat, mayonnaise, oil...man, it made my arteries stiffen as I ate. But it was damned good. I also got a 5"x7" of Sonya and I in our goth drag to display in my office. The coworkers should love it.

All the while James and I were tooling around in Jen's tiny little Miata. We were bein' cool. As we drove through a peaceful Midtown neighborhood we passed a big ol' VW van.

"If you try to drive a hippie van into the twenty-first century," I said, quoting Todd Snider, "you're gonna have car trouble."

"What?" James said.

Last night we all piled up in the living room (again) for a festival of odd English characters. First, we watched Austin Powers (which Sonya had never seen), then Eddie Izzard doing his stand-up thing on HBO. He is a very funny transvestite.

Sonya and I went to the Brooks today (Tennessee's largest art museum, y'all) to catch the last day of the Duane Hanson exhibit. Hanson, for the non-art inclined out there, is this guy who made totally lifelike sculptures of tourists, cowboys, flea-market vendors and (most disturbingly) a motorcycle accident victim. These statues were eerily realistic, and the closer you got the better the illusion worked, which seemed odd to me. My favorite was the one of a heavyset black cleaning woman, complete with feather duster and a rolling garbage can. I'm still not sure it wasn't a real person standing there.

There was also a fat, sweaty man sitting astride a riding lawnmower. You could almost smell it.

Then it was off to Mojo's for a tasty dinner of middle eastern food. Aren't Sonya and I so cosmopolitan? An afternoon at the art gallery, followed by hummus and baba ghanoush. Just another day in the life of the urban elite.

Anyway, we were driving back home and Take On Me by the seminal '80s band A-Ha came on The Phantom. Sonya and I both had to take a stab at the high note where the guy goes, "...take on meeeeeeeee!"

Once it was over, I said, "you know, we both attempted that note and neither one of us came within miles of it."

Sonya's opinion of our musical attempt?

"Butchery."





back'ard

latest

archive

for'ard